Decentralist vanguards: women’s autonomous power and left convergence in Rojava

ABSTRACT

Since 2012, the Rojava Revolution in Northern Syria has attracted the attention of the global Left. Although this project has been subjected to many analyses from different political perspectives, there has not been a systematic analysis of the way it brings together anarchism and Marxism. By focusing on the question of how a revolutionary movement should be organized, we arrive at the argument that Rojava features a specific hybrid of anarchist and Marxist-Leninist revolutionary methods in the form of ‘decentralist vanguardism’. The most advanced form of this hybrid method in Rojava is represented by women. By virtue of being theorized as a revolutionary agent, having autonomous organizations, and carrying a leading role in educating the general public, women in Rojava become what we call ‘a revolutionary middle stratum’: a distinct revolutionary group with autonomous power that can push forward the revolutionary process while dispersing the authority of the vanguard movement.

KEYWORDS:

• Rojava
• revolution
• Marxism
• Leninism
• anarchism
• decentralization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Huseyin Rasit http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5342-2088

Alexander Kolokotronis http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9379-4660

Notes

1 Since the topic of paper is left convergence of anarchism and Marxism-Leninism, we use ‘revolution’ in the sense most commonly understood by these political traditions: an organized mass movement striving to overthrow oppressive structures and usher in emancipatory institutions to transcend all forms of domination.

2 The People’s Protection Units, the main Kurdish military force in Rojava.

3 The Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance of YPG and Arab, Assyrian, and other smaller militias.

4 The Rojava Peshmerga is a military force established in Kurdistan-Iraq by the dissidents of the PYD.

5 Interviews by the first author with Kurdish activists from Kurdistan-Turkey.

6 Asayish (‘security’ in Kurdish) is the police force of the autonomous regions.

7 Interviews by the first author with Kurdish civilians and international volunteers.

8 Interviews by the first author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Huseyin Rasit

Huseyin Rasit is a PhD candidate in sociology at Yale University. His work is centred on themes of revolutionary struggles, ideologies, and state-formation. In his current research, Huseyin is investigating diverse state-formation projects emerging out of the political crises in Iraq and Syria to explain why we observe widely different political formations such as Rojava, Kurdish Regional Government, and the Islamic State. In addition to a recent chapter in Kurdish Autonomy and U.S. Foreign Policy, Huseyin has written about the Kurdish politics and has been published on openDemocracy.

Alexander Kolokotronis

Alexander Kolokotronis is a PhD student in political science at Yale University. His research broadly touches on anarchism, participatory democracy, and workers’ self-management. His current research focus is on the general strike, as well as participatory democracy in public schools. Alexander has also written on issues related to municipalism, worker cooperatives, and union democracy for popular publications such as ROAR Magazine, New Politics, and In These Times.